The choice reflected the positive journalism that the Zaman Group has adopted. Hrant Dink’s murder would be a better choice for newspapers which regard “bad news” as “good news.” The successful presidential election gain even more importance in light of the electoral crises mushrooming in the vicinity of Turkey. With the questioned legitimacy of Pervez Musharraf’s candidacy and the unfortunate killing of Benazir Bhutto, which sparked a series of violent incidents forcing the government to delay the Jan. 8 elections, the Pakistani elections are a test case for democracy. Lebanon is already suffering a months-old stalemate in the presidential elections. It is interesting to observe this tiny nation, where everybody knows who the next president will be even though they cannot agree on his name. The state of Palestine is in an even worse situation. There the legitimately elected government is in a clash with the legitimately elected president and prospects of elections creating a stable and representative government are weak. The presidential elections of Uzbekistan are another story, where everybody knows that the candidacy of Islam Kerimov was constitutionally prohibited, but nobody dares to voice this.
Abdullah Gül’s election as the 11th president of Turkey is also a success story when it is contrasted with the history of Turkey’s previous presidential races. One of the reasons behind the 1980 military intervention was the failure of Parliament to elect a new president. The perpetrators of the coup were so afraid of a failure to elect the next president that they chose to unite the referendum for the new constitution and the approval of the new president. Professor Ali Fuat Başgil was forced to withdraw his candidacy for presidential office in 1961 by some high-ranking military officers who insisted on retired Gen. Cemal Gürsel’s presidency. Başgil was so dejected that he not only withdrew his candidacy, but also resigned from Parliament and left the country to live in France.
Is it Gül’s all-embracing nature that we should praise for this success? No! It isn’t the compromises and realpolitik carried out by Prime Minister Erdoğan, either. It is the maturity of the Turkish democracy that needs to be praised. It is this “culture of democracy” that is lacking in Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. This is not to denigrate the experiences of those nations. This is neither a zero-sum game, nor a race where the most democratic nation wins and the others lose. This is a process with painful experiences which each and every nation needs to pass through.
The fact that Turkey’s democracy has matured is indeed disturbing to certain traditional power centers; the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is one such center. The “deep state” of Turkish politics is another one. The fact that they were not able to “convince” Gül to withdraw his candidacy or to “disappear” him as some did to Bhutto is both an indicator of and a boost to the Turkish democratic tradition. But it is also a serious blow to these conservative centers.
The auto arsons should be interpreted in light of this blow. Those who cannot control politics inevitably run to the streets.
